Techno Bert

Neue Dimensionen

Originally released in 1990 on Doremix Records, Techno Bert was the studio project of Robert Passera and Stefano Cundari, co-owner of Memory Records and mastermind behind some italo disco classic names like Hipnosis, Koto, Faxe. Stefano Cundari unfortunately died of cancer on the same year of the release.

Neue Dimensionen" was developed on Siouxsie & The Banshees's well-known guitar riff of 'Happy House', in a techno crescendo, where the duo would have enjoyed inserting as many samples as possible by stopping only when the capacity of the sampler Akai S1000 memory would be full. While Cundari cared for the sounds from the 48-channel analogue bench and assigned modular effects to the tracks, in studio there was also the musician Stefano Carrara who piloted the keyboards and the Notator installed on the Atari computer. The couple started the work by sampling the Human League "Being Boiled" groove, and built on harmony and melody inspired by Siouxsie & The Banshees with a Jupiter synth to which they added a low reinforcement obtained with a Roland TB-303. The drum set was based on Roland Tr-909 samples. The sample of the voice comes from "Herrmann Hiess Er" by Nina Hagen, cutting and pasting vocal fragments all around the track, from which they got the name 'Neue Dimensionen'.

Even though it was distributed by Flying Records, only the most attentive clubs talked about Techno Bert single. Many discovered it the following year through the Belgian press on Target that circulated in almost all of Europe, or through the Spanish version of Spitfire.Even without big sales numbers and without any radio passage, the song continue to survive by virtue of a subtly underground connotation.